progressive elementary school. the gift of the eighth grade class that was graduate for 2009 was a beautiful mosaic that said -- the wall, capitalism will fail. and i thought it was very interesting in this private school where they announced capitalism will fail from the eighth grade class, was charging tuition with almost no scholarships of 17000 a year. so i'm not sure that all the parents who were paying $17000 a year to see their children indoctrinating against capitalism are actually looking forward to capitalism betting. look, the problem of course with this idea that capitalism is doomed or capitalism will fail is basically clarified, if you go away from a media focus. the problem with the media focus is is always immediate. it's just what is happening right now, this moment. the whole idea of news is this moment up-to-the-minute and then you forget things a moment later. if you take a broader focus and you look at a 50 year, or 30 or even 20 year perspective, it's obvious that capitalism has not fielded what has that has been socialism and particular communism. i think it's striking, the "new york times" today, this morning i was reading it on the train, which did not arrive on time, i was reading on the train the "new york times" has a review of the new nostalgic history of communism called the red flag. and they were basically lamenting the fact that communism has all but disappeared in the world, except for they say it's like examples like a smallpox virus preserved in the laboratory in cuba and in north korea. but that's pretty much it. and if you look at the elections i cover in my book, the elections in europe or the european parliament, the socialist got wiped out everywhere. there's only one country in europe which is greece. and if you look at cross the continent, anyone where the labour party which again is the new labour, which is not the old proudly socialist labor of the past, the tories, conservatives and just new toys and new conservatives. in britain, our research and. there are conservative more friendly to the free market governments in france, and italy, in germany, in denmark, and in israel where part of my family lives. my father, may he rest in peace, went to live in israel 19 years ago. and my brother has made his whole career there. there have been several books about the capitalist revolution in israel stripping away the socialist past that has always held back that economy, and the israeli economy has been a marvel, as soon as they were able to lower the tax burdens and the punishing burdens of regulation on business. and it's been a phenomenal example. right now israel has more companies listed on the nasdaq than any other nation in the united states. there are more israeli nasdaq companies in japanese, than canadian, than british, then german, then anything. it's extraordinary. capitalism has not been shown to fail. capitalism has been shown to work, and here in the united states there is a tremendous amount of self-pity that is encouraged by the victim. one of the things in my ratio is it's the michael medved show where we're proud to say everyday i am not a victim, the idea of american victimhood suggest that our standard of living and our difficulties and our choices, it's all much lower, we can't live the kind of lives that our parents live and it's getting worse. everyone has heard this. it is nonsense. now, robert rector rodger at heritage writer in the building has done terrific work on this and i quote him extensively in the book. if you actually look at any meaningful measure of living standards in the united states, the progress under capless american, particularly since 1980, has been dazzling, has been unprecedented. the options that are available to people, the extended life expectancy, college, we're now at at a stage where the majority of american young people in every ethnic group, are pursuing some form of post high school graduation after they graduate from high school. this is phenomenal. sometimes that education may not be worth what people pay for it, but the fact is one of the reasons that college tuition is so tremendously expensive and it's gone so much more than the cost of inflation is because more and more people want it and can get it. it's extraordinary. in the 1960s, barely 10 percent of americans graduate from college. we are now pushing 30%. out give you one other example. when i was in college back when the earth cooled in the 1960s, and i got a part-time job starting my sophomore year. the main motivation, i might want to say, i was a national merit scholar. and my parents helped me and i didn't need the job to pay for tuition or for room and board. it was much more reasonable than. that was covered. i got the job because i had a girlfriend back home in california. and i had to pay for phone calls. and i figured it out at the time. i was making minimum wage, which at the time was transfixed and our. and it took me about three hours of work to pay for a five minute phone call. think about that for a moment. any of you who have cell phone plans that are unlimited, as most people do. the cost of long distance calls out the cost of air travel, everyone travels by air today. pretty much everyone. i can take that flight from san francisco the other night, everybody was on it. [laughter] >> i don't know. honestly, it seems like there was, i don't know, this seemed like a homeless express that was traveling from san francisco to philadelphia. but it was great. that's america. the truth is, that more is available to more people than ever before. and anyone who doesn't see the added opportunities, comfort, life expectancy, educational opportunities, that we have that would have been undreamed of for our parents and grandparents, anyone who doesn't see that is deliberately blind and deaf. and limited, and embittered. my grandfather was a barrel maker. he came over from ukraine in 1910. he never stayed in a hotel in his life. why would you? that would be very rare for americans to one of the figured that i have in my book, people are not going to believe it but it's an official labor department figure and you know they wouldn't lie. labor department of the united states, typical american family, today spends more and eating out in dinners and is a fast food restaurant or luxuries restaurants or different kind of restaurant than the family spends on health care. and we spend too much on health care. the idea that capitalism is dead, i go into the reasons why capitalism is not dead. .com is very much alive and has been on the market has been advancing, and why so many -- there are at least a billion people who were living under socialist systems, probably more than 3 billion people who were living under social systems if you count both india and china. 30 years ago. who are now living under something that resembles a free market. capitalism is on the march, not dead. brings us to the second biggest lie. is what we don't have to spend so much time on. so breathtakingly stupid. people believe, and you will find many people believe, including some educated people, or presumably educated people, that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. okay, if you believe when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then you believe that creating wealth causes poverty. somehow this is not -- how does creating wealth cost poverty? wealth is not stolen. i mean, he is credited with the stupid line behind every great fortune is a great crime. sorry, that's not true. behind every great fortune is a great creativity. the idea is that if you look at human beings as infinitely creative, then there is no set amount of wealth to which you are limited. creating new wealth does it take wealth away from somebody else. it is not a zero-sum game. and by the way, this is dramatically illustrate by our recent downturn. during the recent downturn, the economic crisis, the group of the population in terms of both dollar and raw dollar amount and percentage who suffered most were of fluence people. the people who had portfolios to see them deflated. and again, did this help anyone? good, now the rich are really suffering. no, it led people to lose jobs. what do you think happens if your boss is losing money? if your boss is losing money, if he loses his net worth, if he finds it more difficult to borrow money to keep the business alive, what happens to your chance for a raise? what happens to job? it goes away. this idea of when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, it is essential marxism. it has been repeated by every historical example to one of the things i do in the book as i go back and look at some of this stuff, nostalgia garbage, that the left used to believe. a lot of it goes back to a nineteentnineteen point windsong called and we got fun. which has become a standard and still use -- there's a line in and we got fun, there's nothing sure when the rich get richer, and then they play a game. they are expecting to save the poor get poorer but they say the poor get children. and then they played the poor get laid-off. the whole idea of the poverty causing wealth of a zero-sum game needs to be rebutted. and one of the ways to rebut it, and tremendously important that people acknowledges, is if you have a materialist worldview, where there is only so much matter on earth, that nothing else can ever be created. matter is neither created nor destroyed. then okay, you can believe there's only so much wealth. and it's simply a question of chopping up the wealth and moving it around, not creating more. george byrne shaw was a pretty smart guy, even though he was a diehard socialist who once said if you rob peter to pay paul, you can generally count on the sport of paul. and that of course is what a great deal of liberalism is based upon. is the idea that you will rob peter to pay paul and make sure there are enough paul's out there to support you. but the notion that that is society's job is to spread around a fixed amount of wealth is to deny the inherent creative power of the individual. and it's basically to look at the world in purely materialistic terms. says in the bible, everyone knows, that man is created in gods image. if man is great in gods image, like god we are infinitely created. there is no limit to what we can create. there is no limit to what we can do. that is the american idea. that brings me to big lie number three. big lie number three, particularly popular right now, is a big lie that says that corporate executives are overpaid and corrupt. of course, you will find a lot of people, even conservatives who will say, yeah, there are a lot of corporate executives, why do they need these tremendous bonuses? one of the things you find that when you actually research bonuses, and the financial industry, and banks that offer, is many of these bonuses actually function as commissions that it was structured this way basically because of governmental interference, because -- this is basically a tax dodge where people are paid in bonuses and often bonuses are stock options. because it's a way of avoiding that greedy hand of government there but the point is that bonuses function as commissions, and even if a company has a terrible, losing season, you still want to reward those salesmen, or those representatives who are doing a good job on a losing team. for instance, people in this country don't understand business. but everybody understands sports. there are millions of americans who play fantasy baseball. right here i understand, you have a baseball team called -- will, some people call it a baseball team. the washington nationals, not a very successful corporation, have been good will on the field and have been doing well off the filter however, they have a plan that -- player named ryan zimmerman. does he deserve a bonus, yes, he does. and he got one. but he's playing for a losing team. the nationals were lack 200 games behind, out of first place. not really, i think it was about 35, but they didn't do well. but that doesn't matter, you see that the point is if you have a bonus structure, this has to do very directly with some of these wall street bonuses, the basic point over here is that this argument that says that somehow the fact that someone is doing well is going to take away from someone else is utterly absurd that if your neighbor all of a sudden has a very good year in business, and has more money to remodel his house or do relents gave the french are in, or to get a nicer car, that doesn't hurt you. if all of a sudden you live in a community, say a small town, if somebody has a business that is booming and he can create more jobs and building new storefront, it doesn't take away from your business. it brings more customers, more energy. there is no finite amount of wealthier, and the notion that corporate executives are all corrupt and overpaid, some are corrupt, but generally, and i cite several studies that have been done of those. business success is by and large based on behavior that people would describe as a virtuous. if you look at the consistent qualities that predictably lead to business success, the quality more than any other, is focused. the ability to concentrate, to focus, to shut out all distractions. reliability. hard work, integrity. people who are all over the map have attention deficit disorder will tend not to function well. or succeed in business. business does not create or encourage or promote fights by large turkey is there are bernie madoff in the world. and just bernie madoff is spending his life and i think many more lifetimes in prison. this is generally what happens to people who buried the iron laws of business success that all of that exist basically because what business depends upon is providing people with some service or product that they choose. that brings the two big lie number four. big lie number four says, small business is good, big business is bad. you alluded to that in the rasmussen poll. i have several bits of polling data that suggest that small business is among the most popular institutions and trusted institutions in america, and big business is among the least popular and trusted. this is truly peculiar. it is truly peculiar. why? because every single small business in the country, wants to get bigger a small business is generally a business that hasn't gotten big yet, or a business that hasn't been particularly successful. that's the nature of the. every big business in the country, almost without exception, started off as a small business. the traditional definition of a small business and big business would surprise a lot of people. according to the department of commerce and the department of labor, federal statistics, anybody know? do you know how many employees you have to have to be considered a big business? 500, good for you. that's exactly. most people think a business that employs 400 people was pretty big. or even a business that employs 100 people. think about a. if you employ 100 people you're a pretty big business. this is an arbitrary distinction. there are some products and some services that require a big business. i was was talking about airlines before. you cannot build airplanes in your garage. if you're going to build jet aircraft and asked people to risk their lives getting on them and fly from one place to another, it's not going to be a little mom-and-pop operation. this is mom and pops airline. we hope to get this puppy up there tonight. no, you need a big business. there are certain things that require a economies in scale otherwise you can't compete, you can do it successfully. you need someone to design the airplane, you need someone to design the interior, etc. etc. etc. and we did then actually, we despite the big light assist small business is so much better. things that really matter like our health, like our survival, we tend to depend on big businesses. most hospitals, most insurance companies most medical device companies are emphatically big businesses. it's good that they are. the notion that small business is inherently more effective shows more integrity, if you remember that story came out earlier this year about -- it was a neighborhood cemetery where they were burying the people 3-d and abusing the corpses in the chicago area. it was a traditional african-american cemetery. and emmett till had been very different that was a mom-and-pop cemetery. it would be tougher for forced long to get away with that kind of thing. some kind of big cemetery business. the truth is that the prejudice, the light is a small business and actually better than big business is sentimental, stupid, it leads to abominations like antitrust law. we've been close to, if you want to be all the cost, close to a billion dollars a year on the antitrust scan. that means your federal government takes your tax money out of your pocket to punish companies that are too successful. because that's what antitrust is. anybody remember that wonderful suit against microsoft? that was so important and it was a huge federal focused and joe klein, the clinton administration, they were going to go out and busted bill gates. do you remember what it was they were suing about primarily against microsoft? was at microsoft gouging people by charging too much? microsoft was creating shabby products. what was it they were stewing about? correct. they were giving people stuff for free. internet explorer. in other words, is that they charge too little. they give people too much that they're giving you too good a deal, not to lousy idea. can you imagine? we passed tax payers this justice department, absurd bureaucracy, to go after businesses that want to charge too little. and why? because we have to protect the open market or do you know they had a 16 year, honest to god, 16 year pursued, countless expenditures, against ibm because ibm was shutting out all competitors in the computer business. ibm really dominates the whole computer business today, right? i mean, this is absurd. what happens is yes, you can have companies that will have a short-term prominence, and even dominance. but when you remove regulation and you stop antitrust interference, the natural cycle of the business is that, for instance, if you take a look, and i have a list in my book of the leading computer companies that were in the world at the time of ibm, none of them are among the 10 leading copies today. the economy churns. it changes. the whole ways with antitrust brings me to the fifth and final big lie, which is the one that is most involved a few blocks from here in capitol hill, in the debate on health care and climate change and everything else. and it's the one that i hope people can come out of here and take late with a mature in this book, feel energized to revive and to challenge and to go bury that lie out in some empty field somewhere with a stake through its heart, and it's the big lie that says that you can trust government to treat people more compassionately, more fairly, then does the private sector. the bureaucracies and nonprofits will more reliably deliver good service to people in everything. van will for-profit corporations. president obama himself expressed something like that. eyesight in the book a graduation speech he gave at arizona state university in tempe, arizona. in the spring of this year. and president of the united states was addressing himself to business school graduates, people who are being equipped to go out in the free market system and create wealth. and he said many of you will go into our corporate system and follow the well-worn path to your own business and has been. but i know also, many of you and i hope more of you will take a higher path and involve yourself in the nonprofit sector. this is insanity. what is good about not making a profit? seriously. think about this for a momen